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October 1955 | Volume 6, Issue 6
The Mills of Early America
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
While the antiquarian still coos over many a useless relic of the past, the American miller and his mill have often been forgotten. Like the farmer and the barn builder, his name is seldom recorded; but his place in the fabric of our history is distinct.
While the antiquarian still coos over many a useless relic of the past, the American miller and his mill have often been forgotten. Like the farmer and the barn builder, his name is seldom recorded; but his place in the fabric of our history is distinct.
The miller was America’s first industrial inventor. He was builder, banker, businessman and host to the countryside. When highways were no wider than today’s bridle paths, the first good roads were built to the mills. Where there was a mill site, there was a nucleus for a town. America had so many Millvilles, Milltowns, Milfords and other towns named after original mills, that the Post Office Department sponsored the changing of many such names to stop the confusion.
There are still abandoned millponds, forgotten mill roads and millstreams that wind through the “old sections” of cities. But the structure with its machinery, once the hub of the village, is usually lost in the oblivion of a vanished landscape.
Over a hundred years ago, roads were used for travel, but almost never for commercial transportation. Even to transport a simple wagonload of wood could cost more than the value of the load; to move salt from Long Island to Danbury, Connecticut, by horse, cost eight times its worth. In Philadelphia, coal shipped from Newcastle, England, cost less than coal hauled over the road from nearby Richmond, Virginia. Every small village had to depend upon itself for almost every necessity, and the mills were the answer. It would have a sawmill and a gristmill: there would also be mills for making cider, salt, flax, plaster, linseed oil, tobacco, barrel staves, axes, bone meal, mustard, and on down to smaller mills that turned out simple necessities of everyday life. In the hamlet of New Preston, Connecticut, there is still a water-powered sawmill. Its saws are actuated by a new turbine which operates underwater and therefore does not ice up the way its original water wheels did. The small stretch of waterway that feeds its turbine is no longer than you can walk in a minute or two, yet there were once about thirty mills on it, almost as many mills as there were residences.
People of today might think of the old-time miller as just another merchant. But if they could step inside an early water-wheeled mill and watch it at work, the miller might be added to their list of American greats. The ponderous wheels and massive gears spring to life with a surge of power that makes the mill house shudder, and which explains why early mills had hand-hewn beams of such tremendous proportions.
“Killed